This Is the Blog of the Farr family, Sam and Wendy Farr and their Daughters Nichola and Helen plus their husbands Andy Higby and David Mattock.
They all live in the Bath Area. Sam works as a freelance photographer, Andy and Nicky run a service improvement business working in mental health and social care and David works in IT.
David and Helen have our two Granddaughters, Tabitha and Lottie.

Friday, 30 March 2007

It was Shoe Shopping time today, Tabitha is proud of her new gym shoes with flashing lights.And Lottie is just as proud of her new Start-rite shoes, bought at the third shop but the only ones that fitted properly.

Early in 1970 we visited East Looe in Cornwall, on the seafront a local artist, called Poggio was doing a 5-minute portrait for 2 Pence deal (I lied about the 2 Pence bit!).He of course couldn’t resist drawing Wendy, but she insisted in keeping her liberty bodice on so we had to pay.As regular visitors to Cornwall we took a print down to him on our next visit.And when we visited the following year we were pleased to see he was using my snap as part of his display.

Monday, 26 March 2007

When we need eggs we drive out to Paxcroft Farm near Trowbridge.It’s good the see the free-range chickens running around in the field.But it's still a large-scale business; this is the egg grading and packing machine.The chickens produce 15 million eggs a year.

Saturday, 24 March 2007

U. S. Rep. Sam Farr of California introduced a bill this year to end a loophole in the federal Unemployment Tax Act that made it possible for a Santa Cruz, Calif., voting monitor, who was a retired county worker, to grind out one gruelling day at the polls in November, claim the next day that he was "laid off," and thereby collect about $12,000 in benefits over a two-year period.

Tuesday, 13 March 2007

Thirteen Horseshoe Walk was the home on my Mother’s family (the Harrisons).They bought it cheap before the First World War as no one wanted thirteen and legend had it that it was the only house that didn’t suffer bomb damage.

Sunday, 11 March 2007

David and Tabitha have been helping to install one of out new compost bins.There will be three on the Farr and Higby Estate when the scheme is finished, meaning no one will have the excuse that the compost bin was too far away.But I don’t expect refuse wagons from miles around coming to dump half the world’s potato peelings.To tell the truth with two ponies living here already we have enough manure, it’s just to help reduce the amount going in the dustbins.

Saturday, 10 March 2007

BT doesn’t have any sense of customer care.It's not content with having 35 MP's accuse it of blackmail for overcharging the poorest customers an extra £4.50 a quarter for not using direct debit.And moving it’s customer service offshore so deaf old people like me, have difficulty explaining service problems in a little village in Somerset to someone on the other side of the world.But today they topped it all by vandalising the only phone box in the village,They have removed the coin box and put up a coins not accepted here sign, now the box only offers 999 and credit card calls.The only problem is that despite having a dialling tone the number for credit cards and operator service doesn’t work.Now they would argue that most people who have a problem with a horse or breakdown in their car will have a mobile phone.But because we live in a valley, most mobiles don’t work, in fact the last BT man that called asked to use our home phone because his mobile didn’t work.

Sunday, 4 March 2007

Living in the country is a problem for Broadband users; I have always received half of the bandwidth offered because of the distance to the exchange.When I was offered 1 meg I had half a meg, when it was speeded up to two I had one, so when BT offered me three of the up to six on offer in return for signing a one year agreement, I jumped at it.But the problem is they use a call centre outside the UK, after three weeks of going through the same computer generated questions, do I have a firewall running at the moment (no), have I changed the filters (three times), can I take the front off the socket and connect to the master socket (no the line is 40 years old I have no master socket).So after weeks of me asking the same question, “please can you send a man with a van?”They relented and sent me the man with van and he replaced the 40-year old line into the house with a new one that he tested and said was capable of supporting 4.7 meg.Well they have managed two meg so far, and I live in hope of it improving slowly.